Les Vampires

Ten episodes, one conspiracy

The nominal hero is Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé), a mild investigative journalist, helped by the reformed crook Mazamette, whose direct-to-camera mugging is the serial's comic heartbeat. Their enemies keep changing shape: the Grand Vampire moves through polite society under identity after identity, and when one chief falls another appears — Satanas, then Vénénos — as if the conspiracy could replace its own head. The gang's methods are an inventory of modern anxiety: poison rings, coded messages, hypnosis, abduction, a ballroom gassed mid-waltz, a portable cannon.

The ten episodes, as Paris first saw them:

• La Tête coupée (The Severed Head) — 13 November 1915
• La Bague qui tue (The Ring That Kills)
• Le Cryptogramme rouge (The Red Cryptogram) — Irma Vep enters
• Le Spectre (The Specter)
• L'Évasion du mort (The Dead Man's Escape)
• Les Yeux qui fascinent (The Mesmerizing Eyes)
• Satanas
• Le Maître de la foudre (The Master of Lightning)
• L'Homme des poisons (The Poisoner)
• Les Noces sanglantes (The Bloody Wedding) — June 1916

Each installment solves an immediate problem and opens a larger one. Villains die without ending the conspiracy; characters vanish and return; the plot happily contradicts itself whenever a better idea comes along. Les Vampires is not television, but its accumulative storytelling works the way a modern crime series works — an appointment kept over months, with cliffhangers doing the advertising.

Feuillade, Gaumont, and the war

Feuillade was Gaumont's artistic director, and the serial began as plain industrial competition: Pathé had announced the French release of an American serial, The Exploits of Elaine, under the title Les Mystères de New York, and Gaumont wanted an answer. Feuillade had already made the five-part Fantômas (1913–14) and knew the register — elusive villains, unstable identities, crime in the middle of ordinary life. What he delivered was not an imitation but something deeply Parisian: a story in which the city's own apartments, courtyards, offices, and rooftops are the infrastructure of conspiracy.

He shot fast, on real locations, with the war on and half the industry mobilized. The camera mostly watches from a stable position, plainly, the way a witness would. That plainness gives impossible events a documentary weight — a figure climbs a drainpipe, a body leaves through a window, and the frame declines to comment.

The serial never mentions the front. It didn't need to. Safe interiors are violated, authority is always a step behind, identities cannot be trusted, and violence arrives without warning — wartime Paris would have recognized the feeling from the inside.

Irma Vep

Cabaret singer, hypnotist's accomplice, cat burglar: Irma Vep enters in episode three and takes the serial over. Her name is an anagram of 'vampire' — a private joke hidden in plain sight.

In the black silk maillot, Musidora became one of silent cinema's permanent silhouettes. She did her own stunts, without a double, and that physical confidence is central to Irma's authority: she climbs, crawls, fights, and escapes with an ease that makes the male criminals around her look temporary. The era had a word for the dangerous, independent woman — the vamp — and Irma exceeds it. She is competent, funny, theatrical, violent, and capable of switching sides while remaining entirely herself.

The police condemned the serial for glamorizing crime and temporarily banned episodes; the bans were lifted, the story goes, after Musidora appealed in person. Irma Vep dies in the last episode, shot by the hero's new bride.

No one has ever quite believed it.

Paris as a character

In most crime films the city is a backdrop. Here it is the mechanism of the plot. Paris's density makes anonymity possible; its social divisions can be crossed by changing clothes; its theaters supply costumes and false identities, its grand houses supply victims, its rooftops supply escape routes. And Feuillade's Paris is both specific and strangely empty — real streets, suddenly occupied by a handful of figures, as if the rest of the population had vanished. The serial alternates between the texture of real places and the sealed logic of a dream.

The teenagers who would grow up to found Surrealism — André Breton and Louis Aragon among them — took that alternation as a revelation: the marvelous did not need to be built. It only needed to be photographed.

“C'est dans Les Vampires qu'il faudra chercher la réalité de ce siècle.”

It is in Les Vampires, Breton wrote, that one must look for the reality of this century. The movement's whole taste for the uncanny ordinary — the hotel corridor, the newspaper headline, the woman on the rooftop — is Feuillade's bequest.

From the surrealists to Irma Vep

The serial's most direct modern afterlife is Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996), in which Maggie Cheung plays a version of herself, hired for a doomed Paris remake of Les Vampires; as the production collapses she starts moving through the city in Irma's black suit, the image escaping the film meant to contain it. Assayas came back to the idea in 2022 as an eight-part series for HBO, with Alicia Vikander in the suit. Both versions circle the same conclusion: you cannot remake Les Vampires, because Irma Vep is no longer a character anyone owns.

The silhouette itself went into the common stock of images long ago — Louise Brooks, Catwoman, the whole language of the masked woman in black. Gaumont restored the serial in 4K in 2014, and it still plays: slower than a modern thriller, stranger than most of them, and carrying its century more lightly than the films that tried to improve on it.

This is the door through which cinema enters the story of the Paris avant-garde — not as an art movement's experiment, but as the popular myth the experiments fed on.